by Michelle Boudin
“It’s ice cream, so it is inherently joyful,” says Seemingly Overzealous co-founder Garrett Tichy of the locally grown ice-cream business he runs with his wife, Jess Berresse. “The whole brand and everything we do is centered around things we love and enjoy — it makes it more fun. We are very intentionally growing something that caters to things we love.”
That includes each other. Tichy and Berresse, who married in December 2023, say their fast-growing, dairy-free ice-cream chain is really a love story — their own. Everything from the name of the shop to the quirky flavors all trace back to how they met and fell in love.
“Seemingly Overzealous is a nod to a text that Garrett sent me the day after our first date,” Berresse explains. “We met over Instagram during the pandemic, and after a month of getting to know each other, it was a little weird to meet people in person. We had a very long date where we talked about everything and said goodbye with a very awkward, hilarious hug. The next day, he reached out and said, ‘Hopefully this doesn’t seem overzealous, but I’d love to see you again.’”
FROM A HOBBY TO A BELOVED BRAND
Their courtship also involved homemade ice-cream making.
“We were making it for fun out of our house with a small ice-cream machine,” Tichy recalls. “We started giving it to friends, and one asked if we could do a gluten-free or a dairy-free version. So we started tinkering with recipes. We spent months testing every milk, every concoction we could find, and we ended up with a really great brown sugar-cinnamon. It still had the texture and creaminess you expect from ice cream, and we were like, ‘This is amazing!’”
Their friends had similar reactions, Berresse says.
“Our friends were blown away. They were so surprised by it. We bought non-dairy ice cream brands to compare, and a lot of them are not great.”
Recognizing a hole in the market for good, non-dairy options, the idea for Seemingly Overzealous was born. The couple opened their first location at Camp North End in May 2023. Their Plaza Midwood location followed a year later, and last summer they started serving scoops on East Boulevard in Dilworth.
FUN WITH FLAVORS
As the former owner of Hygge coworking spaces, Tichy knows a thing or two about running and scaling a business.
“We’re an ice-cream scoop shop, but when Jess and I were discussing whether this was going to be a business, we didn’t want something that existed already. So the thing that differentiates us is that we’re dairy-, egg- and gluten-free. That’s our hook, without sacrificing the taste and quality that you get at a normal ice-cream shop.”
The first flavor that really caused a stir was Grey Blobbin’, made with Earl Grey tea, lemon and honey.
“All the flavors have names with stories behind it,” Tichy explains. “That’s a reference to Jess and I when we were dressed in matching all-grey sweatsuits and we were just being lazy. All the flavor names and design choices are centered around the early days of our dating.”
Well, most of them. Tichy admits some of their most requested flavors are tried-and-true, but done the Seemingly Overzealous way.
“Our biggest seller is cookies and cream (Can’t All Be Cookie) and requires a wild amount of gluten-free Oreos leaving the building every single week.” The second most popular flavor is butter pecan (Never Tear Us Apart), a dairy-free take on the Southern classic.
BUSINESS BOOMS
Business is so good, the couple recently announced they’ll open two more scoop shops later this year: Davidson in April and Matthews in July.
They’re also planning to centralize production at one shop to save money and control quality, while still having as much fun as possible along the way.
“We were just making ice cream for fun, and then we started tinkering with recipes. Now we’re about to open (shops) four and five,” Tichy says. But along with the joy, it’s also taken plenty of hard work to get where they are today.
“We have our motto painted on the side of the building at the Plaza location. ‘Don’t skip the hard stuff, you’ll miss the good stuff.’” SP
